Kaustubh Srikanth

On 17th December 2014, the Government of India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology issued an order to all licensed Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country to block access to 32 websites, effective immediately. The basis of this was a claim that the targeted web services were being used for "Jihadi Propaganda" by "Anti-National groups". As a response to this, a few technologists in Berlin got together and thought it would be a good idea to do some research using free and accessible tools and to look at how censorship has been implemented, as well as the various techniques that could be used to circumvent this censorship. This talk will discuss our findings and make recommendations about how ISPs can handle such censorship requests better, while being fair and transparent to their customers.

On 17th December 2014, the Government of India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology issued an order to all licensed Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country to block access to 32 websites, effective immediately. Not only did the ban affect access to popular cultural sites such as archive.org, vimeo.com, dailymotion.com, but the order also blocked access to sites like github.com, pastebin.com, which are useful for all sorts of people but are especially popular with software developers. The Ministry's order was issued following a request from the Mumbai police's Anti-Terrorism Squad on 15th November 2014. The police request argued that the targeted web services were being used for "Jihadi Propaganda" by "Anti-National groups", and were encouraging youth in the country to join organisations like the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL). As a response to this, a few technologists in Berlin got together and thought it would be a good idea to do some research using free and accessible tools to look at how censorship has been implemented, as well as the various techniques that could be used to circumvent this censorship. The research was conducted through January, 2015 and draws on the browsing experience of several customers of different ISPs around India as well as information gained through the use of the open source censorship measurement toolkit provided by Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) [1] and other manual tests we conducted. Since then, we have been able to turn this into a continued effort to monitor ISPs in India and invited others to contribute to this effort to map and understand various technical implementations of censorship orders. This talk will summarise our key findings, including the different methods of blocking implemented by multiple ISPs. We will also discuss and make recommendations about the different ways ISPs can better handle such censorship orders, while continuing to respect the their customers' right to access to information, and how they can be more transparent while exercising censorship orders and requests from authorities. [1] http://ooni.torproject.org/

23rd of December 2008 was a sad day in India for civil liberties. On this day, The Indian Parliament passed the "The Information Technology (Amendment) Act" with no debate in the House, which effectively means is that the government of India now has the power to monitor all digital communications in the country without a court order or a warrant. The "world's largest democracy" strongly leaning towards becoming a surveillance state raises many questions and poses severe challenges for free speech and economic justice in India and globally. This talk will map and review the current political, socio-cultural and legal landscape of mass-surveillance, data protection and censorship in India and analyse how it ties in to the global landscape of surveillance and censorship. It will also aim to create a discussion space to investigate the deeper effects of these so called "welfare" projects and how citizen-led movements can drive the state towards stronger data protection and privacy laws.

Section 69 of the act states, "Section 69 empowers the Central Government/State Government/ its authorized agency to intercept, monitor or decrypt any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource if it is necessary or expedient so to do in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence or for investigation of any offence". What this effectively means is that the government of India now has the power to monitor all digital communications in the country without a court order or a warrant. Since then, India has gone on to setup several projects which leverage technology to freely collect, mine, share and commoditize citizen data, resulting in a massive intelligence network. These include the world’s largest biometric ID scheme (Aadhaar/UID), the Central Monitoring System(CMS), the Telephone Call Interception System (TCIS), a DNA data bank and the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID). The "world's largest democracy" strongly leaning towards becoming a surveillance state raises many questions and poses severe challenges for free speech and economic justice, not just in India but globally. This talk will map and review the current political, socio-cultural and legal landscape of mass-surveillance, data protection and censorship in India and analyse how it ties in to the global landscape of surveillance and censorship. It will also aim to create a discussion space to investigate the deeper effects of these so called "welfare" projects and how citizen-led movements can drive the state towards stronger data protection and privacy laws. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Kaustubh Srikanth is a hactivist, technologist and researcher based between Berlin and Bangalore. He is one of the lead organisers of the annual Open Data Camp in India and currently works as the Head of Technology at Tactical Tech (https://tacticaltech.org), an international NGO working to enable the effective use of information for progressive social change.